ew spark of tiny life
must flare up, else never so many could inhabit the water. The
coarser aggregations of these we see in bewildering profusion and
variety every time the tides fall back and leave the rocks bare.
At the bottom of the ebb I like to climb perilously down the rough
Glades cliffs to life-brooding pools and inlets, where lazy waves
swirl or are for a brief hour cut off. At the half-tide line the
rock that is a reddish granite becomes chalky white with the
shells of barnacles that cover every inch of space from there
down. Acorn-like, they cluster closer than ever acorns did on the
most prolific oak. After the tides reach them as they rise, the
whole surface of the rock must be fuzzy with their curved cirri of
tongues which protrude and lap the rising waves. Their number is
legion, yet how infinite must be the fine floating life, so fine
that we cannot note that it clouds the limpid water, on which
these sessile gray creatures feed.

Below a certain level these are crowded out by the mussels which
grow in such dense accumulations that they cling not only to the
rock but to one another and to stubby brown seaweed till they are
like nothing so much as pods of bees swarming about their queen.
So dense is this grouping of living creatures that the inner ones
are smothered by their crowding fellows and serve merely as a
foundation on which these build. Even among these swarm starfishes
and limpets and other crustaceans, and streamers of kelp squirm
out from the rock where they keep slender hold, to sway in the
restless water, just as all the rocks above a certain depth and
below a certain height are olive black with dense hangings of
rockweed while in depths that are just awash at low tide they are
olive brown with unending mats of Irish moss. These are but the
forms of overwhelming life that meet the eye on first descending
into the cool depths. To name all that may be noted in just the
pause of a single ebb would be to become a catalogue.

[Illustration: Along the Salt Marsh]

Yet howsoever vivid the life or astounding by its multiplicity it
is not impressions of these that linger long after one has come up
from the bottom of the ebb. It is rather that here one has
breathed the air of the deep life laboratory of the world, that
into his lungs and pores and all through his marrow has thrilled a
breath of that subtle essence, that life renewing principle which
Fernando de Soto sought in the fountain of you